Destinations / GO YOSEMITEMY SON, JOE, is the perfect kid: smart, funny, and so relentlessly health-minded that when I want to eat a peanut butter cup I have to do it in the closet, in the dark. Still, a couple of years ago he was mired in that early teen stage where nothing impressed him. Certainly not his father. And not anything else, because being impressed would not be cool.So I took him to Yosemite. I figured that if any place in the world might knock the cool out ofhim, it would be the park John Muir called “the grandest of all the special temples of Nature.”Our first day there, we took the bus from Yosemite Valley up to Glacier Point, then hiked thecliff-clinging trail back down.As we trudged down the switchbacks Joe was, initially, scared. He’d never been anyplacewhere in theory one could stumble on the trail and fall 1,000 feet. Then he forgot to be scared.He was too busy being awed. So awed that he let me take a picture of him with my iPhone — not,believe me, something he normally agreed to — with the valley luminous behind him.That’s Yosemite. For well over a century, it’s dispensed guaranteed grandeur to millions ofvisitors — even hard-to-impress teens. Its magic demands strategy, however. With 1,169 squaremiles and 4 million annual visitors, you need to know where to go, and when. Here are the top fiveYosemite experiences for 2017.The Grandest TempleWhether it’s your first visit or your tenth, Yosemite can change your life.Here’s where to go in 2017. BY PETER FISH• Celebrate Mariposa Grove

Yosemite’s biggest news is that iconic Mariposa
Grove is set to reopen after a t wo-year, multi-million-dollar restoration. The park’s largest
stand of giant sequoias, Mariposa contains
500 redwoods that include 1,800-year-old
Grizzly Giant and the California Tunnel Tree,
remnant of that era when park visitors thought
they should be able to drive through anything.

Funded by the park service and the YosemiteConservancy, the project benefits both visitorsand trees. Paved roads have been replaced bytrails, a parking lot by restored sequoia habitat.A new shuttle service will take visitors to thegrove from the park’s south entrance. Mariposais set to reopen this summer: check the parkwebsite ( nps.gov/yose) for updates.